Thursday, 30 June 2011

Scientists who search for obscure or supposedly extinct creatures are not getting the respect and recognition they deserve

LAST December an 8-second amateur video went viral. Shot in remote northern Tasmania, the blurry footage featured a long-tailed mammal trotting across a meadow with an oddly stilted gait. According to the film-maker, Murray McAllister, the animal was a Tasmanian tiger.The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, is a wolf-sized marsupial predator that has been presumed extinct since the last known specimen died in Hobart zoo in 1936. Yet despite its apparent demise, reports of Tassie tigers refuse to die. Hundreds of sightings, many from seemingly credible observers, have been recorded, both in Tasmania and on the mainland.When I saw the video there was something vaguely familiar about it. Then it hit me: the animal moved like a red fox. I'd raised a fox as a boy in the western US, and they have a peculiar way of trotting. Soon, others were saying the same thing. Then a faecal sample McAllister collected was analysed for its DNA: it was a red fox

Wednesday, 29 June 2011

Rare Deep-Water Giant Squid From South Florida Brought To UF For Research; 'It Took About Six People To Move It'

by Underwatertimes.com News Service - June 28,

GAINSVILLE, Florida -- University of Florida researchers received a rare 25-foot-long, deep-water giant squid Monday, the only one of its kind in the collections of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Recovered by recreational fishermen who found the creature floating on the surface about 12 miles offshore from Jensen Beach Sunday, museum scientists collected the specimen from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Tequesta Field Laboratory in Palm Beach County and returned to the Gainesville campus late Monday.

"It's so rare to get these specimens and they're such deep-water animals that we don't know much about how they live," said John Slapcinsky, Florida Museum malacology collection manager. "This specimen provides an excellent opportunity to learn things about these creatures we couldn't find out any other way."

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

A tale of murder, myth, monsters and a bit of magic set in modern day Loch Ness.Several university people meet at the Loch, all pursuing their own research. They end up banded together to help the Laird and his friends fight a real enemy, but who are these men who look so alike, why do they want the laird? and is there a monster in the Loch?. The body count is rising, and all depends on a few people to save the world

Lots of odd creatures come from the sea, and add to the list a one-eyed bull shark fetus that was removed from the body of its captured mother recently off La Paz, Mexico, in the Sea of CortezA brief story about the shark is on the Pisces Sportfishing blog. Pete Thomas Outdoors shared the top image with two shark experts in California and both were skeptical at first, suggesting it was some kind of hoax.Ciclope One of them jokingly identified the species as a "Cycloptomus" because of a single eye -- if it is, in fact, an actual eye -- located just above the mouth.But Tracy Ehrenberg, general manager at Pisces Sportfising, has been in touch with renowned shark expert Felipe Galvan, who has seen the shark and has even produced a paper on the discovery.The paper is under scientific review. More information will be shared here when it becomes available.

Sunday, 26 June 2011

After all this talk about fake stuff to do with bigfoot,I am not going to go into the debate about the face print, footprints etc, I decided to see how easy it is to fake a photo. I took a photo I had taken at Loch Ness in 2000 and added a couple of humps. I have deliberately posted the photo so you can see it has been scanned in so no one tries to use it.

By sticking the humps on a shadow in the water that was already in the photo,I was amazed how real it could have looked if scanned again and especially if turned into black and white. So It is that easy.
But the question still remains -why would anyone deliberately mislead people by doing that? To a genuine researcher , this sort of fraud is just beyond comprehension , and means it makes the cryptid a joke ,so that very few scientists will get involved in any attempt at serious study.Modern technology makes it too easy, even a know nothing about photography like myself ,can do it.

Friday, 24 June 2011

Cemetery of giant creatures found in Central Africa. 44734.jpegA team of anthropologists found a mysterious burial in the jungle near the city of Kigali Rwanda (Central Africa). The remains belong to gigantic creatures that bear little resemblance to humans. Head of research group believes that they could be visitors from another planet who died as a result of a catastrophe.According to the scientists, they were buried at least 500 years ago. At first, researchers thought that they came across the remains of ancient settlements, but no signs of human life have been found nearby.

The 40 communal graves had approximately 200 bodies in them, all perfectly preserved. The creatures were tall - approximately 7 feet. Their heads were disproportionately large and they had no mouth, nose or eyes.The anthropologists believe that the creatures were members of an alien landing, possibly destroyed by some terrestrial virus to which they had no immunity. However, no traces of the landing of the spacecraft or its fragments were discovered.This is not the first such finding. In the summer of 1937 a group of Chinese scientists led by Professor Chi Putei surveyed the caves of Mount Bayan-Kara-Ula. Inside they found skeletons with excessively large heads and puny bodies. Nearby there were 176 stone plates. In the center of each plate there was a hole from which a spiral groove spread out to the perimeter with some characters on it.

Issik Kul is a remote deep-water lake located in the northern Tian Shan Mountains, in the Transiliysk Ala Tau area of Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia). The name means “warm water”; the lake is surrounded by snow-capped peaks but it never freezes.According to a well-informed Ukrainian writer V. Krapiva, in the late 1930s a Russian researcher of the paranormal, Grabovsky conducted an interview with a reluctant witness. That man and his friends had explored a cave near the Issik Kul Lake, where they discovered three human skeletons, each more than three meters tall. The skeletons were adorned with decorations that looked like bats (flying mammals) made from silver. The men became scared out of their wits and kept silent about their discovery for many long years. They did melt the silver decorations, but a small piece had been saved. Soviet scientists who had studied the piece said they could not determine its age. Interestingly, a Kyrgyz legend does mention a submerged city in the lake. The city’s ruler, King Ossounes, was a creature with "long asinine ears". The lake itself has been known to experience paranormal phenomena.The earliest mention of similar gigantic beings dates back to early 1900's. Several boys in Georgia (at the time, part of the Russian Empire) discovered a cave inside a mountain, full of humanoid skeletons. Each skeleton was about three meters tall. To get to the cave, the boys had to dive into a lake. George Papashvili and his wife recall the incident a book published in New York in 1925, St. Martin's Press (Anything can happen). In 1953, Jose Ferrer played the Georgian immigrant, George Papashvili whose book is a classic story of an immigrant adjusting to life in the United States.Many years later a much more sinister incident took place in the Soviet Union. Russian paranormal phenomena magazine ANOMALIYA (issue #4, 1992) contained an article written by Mark Shteynberg, a Soviet veteran of the Afghan war. He is an author of several books; an expert on Russia's military, who now resides in the United States. In the summer of 1982, Mark Shteynberg, along with Lt. Colonel Gennady Zverev, actively conducted periodic training of the reconnaissance divers ("frogmen") of the Turkistan and Central Asian military regions. The training exercises had been taking place at the Issik Kul Lake.According to media reports, this is where powerful but not too accurate Soviet torpedoes, underwater missiles, were tested during the Soviet times. Today, in Kyrgyzstan, reportedly, there is still a Russian naval long-distance communications center at the Issik-Kul Lake.

Thursday, 23 June 2011

Few know what lurks the depths of the murky, brackish, crustacean-filled Lake Merritt. Few know what beastly beast, what cryptid, what leviathan, what man-eating monster could be swimming below, slithering through those fetid waters. Few know ... but many have seen."It's black, it's big, it has spikes on its head and its tongue sticks out," says Dr. Richard Bailey, local expert on the rumored Lake Merritt monster and executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute, a non-profit dedicated to cleaning the lake. "It's got typical round monster humps."According to Dr. Bailey, who has a masters degree in zoology and a doctorate in natural resources, sightings of this Lake Merritt monster, which he fondly refers to as the "Oak-ness monster," have become more frequent in the past five years. Dr. Bailey believes the creature prefers clean lakes, so perhaps it is no coincidence that he says these appearances coincide with massive lake clean-ups that make it easier for lake-goers to spot monster-like objects in the water. "There were reports of him years ago," he says. "The water quality got bad for awhile, and then it got better."

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Blistering barnacles! A real Yeti skin on sale in Geneva! Not exactly; it is the pelt of an Ursus arctos pruinosus, or rare Tibetan blue bear, to be more precise.The hide is the main attraction on Wednesday at the Hotel des Ventes auction house. It was originally collected by mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary during his famous Yeti hunt to the Himalayas in 1960.“It belongs to a private Swiss individual whose father bought it at Christies in London in 1978 for £1,200 (SFr1,640),” auctioneer Bernard Piguet told swissinfo.ch. “He was fascinated by its rarity and everything to do with Hillary.”“It’s a blue bear from the Himalayas,” said Piguet. “But it was considered the Yeti until the expedition of Sir Edmund in 1960. He went there to find out if the Yeti was real or not.”

The New Zealand climber, who was one of the first men to scale Everest in 1953, travelled to the Himalayas with an American expedition in pursuit of the “Abominable Snowman”.The expedition collected furs, skulls, bones and other local evidence that were sent back to Britain for scientific analysis, including the pelt currently being sold in Geneva.Hillary, who had set out with an open mind about Yetis, reportedly completed his hunt with these words: “I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs.”The mission concluded that Yeti tracks were human footprints deformed by the melting snow, that Yeti sightings by Sherpas were untrustworthy, and that all the scalps were undoubtedly fakes.

The TV show Finding Bigfoot has a lot of critics debunking the evidence that the legendary cryptid really exists. That now includes the people who appear on the show itself.Cast members from the TV show have commented in various online forums that they are bugged by the heavy-handed editing done by producers of the series, and are not happy that they seem to be putting false words in their mouths. To say nothing of using tricks to make their actual findings more seemingly groundbreaking.

The Weird Helmet

The Weird Shield

Dark Esk

Dark Wear

Dark Ness

Dark Ness by Tabitca Cope

New book on kindle- myths, murder, monsters and magic in modern day Loch Ness

New Cryptofiction book out

mysterious creatures roam the countryside,what is the secret of the horror tunnel and what are the modern day witches up to with the fifth reich? our Friends from the book Dark Ness once again meet cryptids and danger . s

About Me

Mother, author, cat lover, amateur cryptozoologist, cook and bottle washer, some times lover, single parent,middle aged,a mad woman without an attic, red wine and chocolate lover.Now housebound due to ill health so an armchair researcher.Too wheezy to sit in a hide and watch for cryptids anymore lol.Have now taken up crafting when I feel able.I now have a Fiction book out on amazon Kindle Dark Ness by Tabitca Cope set in, you guessed it, Loch Ness with monsters , murder , myth and magic.